The institutions involved in carrying out this “research” include: Stanford University, Yale University, Brown University, Duke University, Wake Forest, and University of Alabama at Birmingham (a complete list is at the end).

In a follow-up letter, Public Citizen has informed HHS Secretary Sebelius that 4,500 extremely vulnerable premature babies are being enrolled in 7 publicly funded experiments conducted by the National Research Network. This Network, comprised of 23 medical research centers, conducted the lethal oxygen experiment, SUPPORT. See: http://www.ahrp.org/cms/content/view/915/9/

This study is comparing two different strategies for treating anemia (low red blood cell count) in extremely premature infants (birth weight of less than 2.2 pounds).

The infants are randomly divided into two groups. Babies in one group receive blood transfusions whenever their red blood cell counts are moderately low (“liberal” transfusion group), and babies in the other group will receive blood transfusions only when their red blood cell counts are severely low (“restricted” transfusion group). The researchers will then determine whether one group of babies has higher rates of death or long term neurologic damage compared with the other group. The study began in December 2012 and is expected to continue until August 2017. The researchers plan to enroll more than 1,800 extremely premature babies.

Note that the primary endpoint of the newly uncovered current infant experiments–like that of the oxygen SUPPORT experiment–is listed as “death or severe disability.” That is an indication to us that the experiment is NOT geared toward improving the infant’s survival chances.

Public Citizen urges HHS Secretary to make the protocols and consent forms for these trials and all those conducted by the Network since 1986 public available on the HHS website; order suspension of new enrollment in the ongoing trials until they are independently assessed for appropriateness and adequacy.

The Alliance for Human Research Protection calls for disciplinary action to hold medical researchers and their academic institutions accountable for violations of Federal research protections. If research violated Federal protections, resulting in preventable injury or deaths, the senior researchers involved should be ineligible to obtain public funding; their research privileges should be suspended for a probationary period during which they should enroll in medical ethics training. If ever they violate ethical / legal standards again, they should be banned from all research involving human subjects.

AHRP also calls for the revocation of the Federal licensure from academic institutions that have been the site of unethical medical research whose subjects suffered permanent injury or death—as happened in 2001 when Johns Hopkins University research license was suspended. http://www.hhs.gov/ohrp/detrm_letrs/jul01a.pdf

The 23 research centers that conducted the SUPPORT experiment on premature babies are:

The CDC Left Conventional Medical Care Off of Their Death List — It Should be #1

Over a decade ago, Professor Bruce Pomerance of the University of Toronto concluded that properly prescribed and correctly taken pharmaceutical drugs were the fourth leading cause of death in the U.S. More recently, an article authored in two parts by Gary Null, PhD, Carolyn Dean, MD, ND, Martin Feldman, MD, Debora Rasio, MD, and Dorothy Smith, PhD, describes in excruciating detail how the modern conventional American medical system has bumbled its way into becoming the leading cause of death and injury in the United States.

From medical errors to adverse drug reactions to unnecessary procedures, heart disease, cancer deaths and infant mortality, the authors took statistics straight from the most respected medical and scientific journals and investigative reports by the Institutes of Medicine (IOM), and showed that on the whole, American medicine caused more harm than good.

In 2010 (the same year from which the CDC data came), years after the original article was written, an analysis in the New England Journal of Medicineii piqued my interest – as the researchers found that, despite efforts to improve patient safety in the past few years, the health care system hasn’t changed much at all.

Instead, 18 percent of patients were harmed by medical care (some repeatedly) and over 63 percent of the injuries could have been prevented. In nearly 2.5 percent of these cases, the problems caused or contributed to a person’s death. In another 3 percent, patients suffered from permanent injury, while over 8 percent experienced life-threatening issues, such as severe bleeding during surgery.

In a June 2010 report in the Journal of General Internal Medicine, study authors said that in looking over recordsiii that spanned from 1976 to 2006 (the most recent year available) they found that, of 62 million death certificates, almost a quarter-million deaths were coded as having occurred in a hospital setting due to medication errors.

An estimated 450,000 preventable medication-related adverse events occur in the U.S. every year.

The costs of adverse drug reactionsiv to society are more than $136 billion annually — greater than the total cost of cardiovascular or diabetic care.

Adverse drug reactions cause injuries or death in 1 of 5 hospital patients.

The reason there are so many adverse drug eventsv in the U.S. is because so many drugs are used and prescribed – and many patients receive multiple prescriptions at varying strengths, some of which may counteract each other or cause more severe reactions when combined.